Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (907 page)

Ella sat for a while as if stunned, then rushed into the adjoining chamber and flung herself upon her face on the bed.

Her grief and distraction shook her to pieces; and she lay in this frenzy of sorrow for more than an hour.  Broken words came every now and then from her quivering lips: “O, if he had only known of me — known of me — me! . . . O, if I had only once met him — only once; and put my hand upon his hot forehead — kissed him — let him know how I loved him — that I would have suffered shame and scorn, would have lived and died, for him!  Perhaps it would have saved his dear life! . . . But no — it was not allowed!  God is a jealous God; and that happiness was not for him and me!”

All possibilities were over; the meeting was stultified.  Yet it was almost visible to her in her fantasy even now, though it could never be substantiated —

“The hour which might have been, yet might not be,

Which man’s and woman’s heart conceived and bore,

Yet whereof life was barren.”

She wrote to the landlady at Solentsea in the third person, in as subdued a style as she could command, enclosing a postal order for a sovereign, and informing Mrs. Hooper that Mrs. Marchmill had seen in the papers the sad account of the poet’s death, and having been, as Mrs. Hooper was aware, much interested in Mr. Trewe during her stay at Coburg House, she would be obliged if Mrs. Hooper could obtain a small portion of his hair before his coffin was closed down, and send it her as a memorial of him, as also the photograph that was in the frame.

By the return-post a letter arrived containing what had been requested.  Ella wept over the portrait and secured it in her private drawer; the lock of hair she tied with white ribbon and put in her bosom, whence she drew it and kissed it every now and then in some unobserved nook.

“What’s the matter?” said her husband, looking up from his newspaper on one of these occasions.  “Crying over something?  A lock of hair?  Whose is it?”

“He’s dead!” she murmured.

“Who?”

“I don’t want to tell you, Will, just now, unless you insist!” she said, a sob hanging heavy in her voice.

“O, all right.”

“Do you mind my refusing?  I will tell you someday.”

“It doesn’t matter in the least, of course.”

He walked away whistling a few bars of no tune in particular; and when he had got down to his factory in the city the subject came into Marchmill’s head again.

He, too, was aware that a suicide had taken place recently at the house they had occupied at Solentsea.  Having seen the volume of poems in his wife’s hand of late, and heard fragments of the landlady’s conversation about Trewe when they were her tenants, he all at once said to himself, “Why of course it’s he!  How the devil did she get to know him?  What sly animals women are!”

Then he placidly dismissed the matter, and went on with his daily affairs.  By this time Ella at home had come to a determination.  Mrs. Hooper, in sending the hair and photograph, had informed her of the day of the funeral; and as the morning and noon wore on an overpowering wish to know where they were laying him took possession of the sympathetic woman.  Caring very little now what her husband or any one else might think of her eccentricities, she wrote Marchmill a brief note, stating that she was called away for the afternoon and evening, but would return on the following morning.  This she left on his desk, and having given the same information to the servants, went out of the house on foot.                  

When Mr. Marchmill reached home early in the afternoon the servants looked anxious.  The nurse took him privately aside, and hinted that her mistress’s sadness during the past few days had been such that she feared she had gone out to drown herself.  Marchmill reflected.  Upon the whole he thought that she had not done that. Without saying whither he was bound he also started off, telling them not to sit up for him.  He drove to the railway-station, and took a ticket for Solentsea.

It was dark when he reached the place, though he had come by a fast train, and he knew that if his wife had preceded him thither it could only have been by a slower train, arriving not a great while before his own.  The season at Solentsea was now past: the parade was gloomy, and the flys were few and cheap.  He asked the way to the Cemetery, and soon reached it.  The gate was locked, but the keeper let him in, declaring, however, that there was nobody within the precincts.  Although it was not late, the autumnal darkness had now become intense; and he found some difficulty in keeping to the serpentine path which led to the quarter where, as the man had told him, the one or two interments for the day had taken place.  He stepped upon the grass, and, stumbling over some pegs, stooped now and then to discern if possible a figure against the sky.  He could see none; but lighting on a spot where the soil was trodden, beheld a crouching object beside a newly made grave.  She heard him, and sprang up.

“Ell, how silly this is!” he said indignantly.  “Running away from home — I never heard such a thing!  Of course I am not jealous of this unfortunate man; but it is too ridiculous that you, a married woman with three children and a fourth coming, should go losing your head like this over a dead lover! . . . Do you know you were locked in?  You might not have been able to get out all night.”

She did not answer.

“I hope it didn’t go far between you and him, for your own sake.”

“Don’t insult me, Will.”

“Mind, I won’t have anymore of this sort of thing; do you hear?”

“Very well,” she said.

He drew her arm within his own, and conducted her out of the Cemetery.  It was impossible to get back that night; and not wishing to be recognized in their present sorry condition he took her to a miserable little coffee-house close to the station, whence they departed early in the morning, traveling almost without speaking, under the sense that it was one of those dreary situations occurring in married life which words could not mend, and reaching their own door at noon.

The months passed, and neither of the twain ever ventured to start a conversation upon this episode.  Ella seemed to be only too frequently in a sad and listless mood, which might almost have been called pining.  The time was approaching when she would have to undergo the stress of childbirth for a fourth time, and that apparently not tend to raise her spirits.

“I don’t think I shall get over it this time!” she said one day.”Pooh! what childish foreboding!  Why shouldn’t it be as well now as ever?”

She shook her head.  “I feel almost sure I am going to die; and I should be glad, if it were not for Nelly, and Frank, and Tiny.”

“And me!”

“You’ll soon find somebody to fill my place,” she murmured, with a sad smile. “And you’ll have a perfect right to; I assure you of that.”

“Ell, you are not thinking still about that — poetical friend of yours?”

She neither admitted nor denied the charge.  “I am not going to get over my illness this time,” she reiterated.  “Something tells me I shan’t.”

This view of things was rather a bad beginning, as it usually is; and, in fact, six weeks later, in the month of May, she was lying in her room, pulseless and bloodless, with hardly strength enough left to follow up one feeble breath with another, the infant for whose unnecessary life she was slowly parting with her own being fat and well.  Just before her death she spoke to Marchmill softly: —

“Will, I want to confess to you the entire circumstances of that — about you know what — that time we visited Solentsea.  I can’t tell what possessed me — how I could forget you so, my husband!  But I had got into a morbid state: I thought you had been unkind; that you had neglected me; that you weren’t up to my intellectual level, while he was, and far above it.  I wanted a fuller appreciator, perhaps, rather than another lover — ”

She could get no further then for very exhaustion; and she went off in sudden collapse a few hours later, without having said anything more to her husband on the subject of her love for the poet.  William Marchmill, in truth, like most husbands of several years’ standing, was little disturbed by retrospective jealousies, and had not shown the least anxiety to press her for confessions concerning a man dead and gone beyond any power of inconveniencing him more.

But when she had been buried a couple of years it chanced one day that, in turning over some forgotten papers that he wished to destroy before his second wife entered the house, he lighted on a lock of hair in an envelope, with the photograph of the deceased poet, a date being written on the back in his late wife’s hand.  It was that of the time they spent at Solentsea.

Marchmill looked long and musingly at the hair and portrait, for something struck him.  Fetching the little boy who had been the death of his mother, now a noisy toddler, he took him on his knee, held the lock of hair against the child’s head, and set up the photograph on the table behind, so that he could closely compare the features each countenance presented.  By a known but inexplicable trick of Nature there were undoubtedly strong traces of resemblance to the man Ella had never seen; the dreamy and peculiar expression of the poet’s face sat, as the transmitted idea,, upon the child’s, and the hair was of the same hue.

“I’m damned if I didn’t think so!” murmured Marchmill.  “Then she did play me false with that fellow at the lodgings!  Let me see: the dates — the second week in August . . . the third week in May. . . . Yes . . . yes. . . . Get away, you poor little brat! You are nothing to me!”

1893

The Spectre of the Real

An end-of-the-century Narrative

(co-written with Florence Henniker)

I

A certain March night of this present “waning age” had settled down upon the woods and the park and the parapets of Ambrose Towers. The harsh stable-clock struck a quarter-to-ten.  Thereupon a girl in light evening attire and wraps came through the entrance-hall, opened the front door and the small wrought-iron gate beyond it which led to the terrace, and stepped into the moonlight.  Such a person, such a night, and such a place were unexceptionable materials for a scene in that poetical drama of two which the world has often beheld; which leads up to a contract that causes a slight sinking in the poetry, and a perceptible lack of interest in the play.

She moved so quietly that the alert birds resting in the great cedar tree never stirred.  Gliding across its funereal shadow over a smooth plush of turf, as far as to the Grand Walk whose pebbles shone like the floor-stones of the Apocalyptic City, she paused and looked back at the old brick walls — red in the daytime, sable now — at the shrouded mullions, the silhouette of the tower; though listening rather than seeing seemed her object incoming to the pause.  The clammy wings of a bat brushed past her face, startling her and making her shiver a little.  The stamping of one or two horses in their stalls surprised her by its distinctness and isolation.  The servants’ offices were on the other side of the house, and the lady who, with the exception of the girl on the terrace, was its only occupant, was resting on a sofa behind one of the curtained windows.  So Rosalys went on her way unseen, trod the margin of the lake, and plunged into the distant shrubberies.

The clock had reached ten.  As the last strokes of the hour rang out a young man scrambled down the sunk-fence bordering the pleasure-ground, leapt the iron railing within, and joined the girl who stood awaiting him.  In the half-light he could not see how her full under-lip trembled, or the fire of joy that kindled in her eyes.  But perhaps he guessed, from daylight experiences, since he passed his arm round her shoulders with assurance, and kissed her ready mouth many times.  Her head still resting against his arm they walked towards a bench, the rough outlines of which were touched at one end only by the moon-rays.  At the dark end the pair sat down.

“I cannot come again” said the girl.

“Oh?” he vaguely returned.  “This is new.  What has happened?  I thought you said your mother supposed you to be working at your Harmony, and would never imagine our meeting here?” The voice sounded just a trifle hard for a lover’s.

“No, she would not.  And I still detest deceiving her.  I would do it for no one but you, Jim.  But what I meant was this: I feel that it can all lead to nothing.  Mother is not a bit more worldly than most people, but she naturally does not want her only child to marry a man who has nothing but the pay of an officer in the Line to live upon.  At her death (you know she has only a life-interest here), I should have to go away unless my uncle, who succeeds, chose to take me to stay with him. I have no fortune of my own beyond a mere pittance. Two hundred a year.”

Jim’s reply was something like a sneer at the absent lady:

“You may as well add to the practical objection the sentimental one; that she wouldn’t allow you to change your fine old crusted name for mine, which is merely the older one of the little freeholder turned out of this spot by your ancestor when he came.”

“Dear, dear Jim, don’t say those horrid things! As if I had ever even thought of that for a moment!”

He shook her hand off impatiently, and walked out into the moonlight.  Certainly as far as physical outline went he might have been the direct product of a line of Paladins or hereditary Crusaders.  He was tall, straight of limb, with an aquiline nose, and a mouth fitfully scornful. Rosalys sat almost motionless, watching him. There was no mistaking the ardour of her feelings; her power over him seemed to be lessened by his consciousness of his influence upon the lower and weaker side of her nature. It gratified him as a man to feel it; and though she was beautiful enough to satisfy the senses of the critical, there was perhaps something of contempt inwoven with his love. His victory had been too easy, too complete.

“Dear Jim, you are not going to be vexed? It really isn’t my fault that I can’t come out here again! Mother will be downstairs to-morrow, and then she might take it into her head to look at any time into the schoolroom and see how the Harmony gets on.”

“And you are going off to London soon?” said Jim, still speaking gloomily.